Neth Smiley

A poem written after I began to interact more in the furry community, and became frustrated with the over-reliance on human mental structures, and the limited situations they could be found in.
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Give me my lovers.

It has recently come to my attention that some people that I care about are unsure how to identify helicopters, and that this inability can be frightening in cases where unusual helicopters are out and about. I am decent at identifying helicopters (having spent all my life in an area with a lot of them), so here is a basic guide for those who are interested.

When you see a helicopter, the first question you should ask is, what color is it? Most helicopters have a white underside, so here are more color distinctions for the rest of the craft. Often, you can pick out rough symbols and letters on its side, either with the naked eye or with a pair of binoculars.

- Medical and rescue helicopters generally have some elements of orange or red, although they may sometimes have other colors. Their letters are generally darker in color.

- Firefighting helicopters are usually orange/red or blue-black

- Police helicopters are generally blue-black with paler letters, although there may be identifying letters in black on their undersides.

- Private helicopters are generally white, but may occasionally be greyish-black. However, they are always quite small.

- Military helicopters are generally "mottled" in their coloration, and do not have white undersides.

The next question you should ask is, what is its flight path? Helicopters are going to try to get where they need to with the minimum amount of effort, because fuel is expensive and time is often of the essence.

- If you are close to a hospital, it's probably headed there

- If there's a fire, it's probably moving to help with firefighting maneuvers

- If there's neither, then why might it be going where it is, for non-conspiratorial reasons?

The primary reason one sees "black helicopters" is that they are searching for potential fires.

ABJER: 
Once there lived an Arab stallion named Abjer. He lived in the land of the Immortals. His first birthday was in 1998. One day there was a bombing raid. Because he could outrun anything in the world, or anyway, no HORSE could outrun him. He then rescued all the immortals and carried them to safety. Then they built a... [end]

THE MAN WHO TURNED INTO A DRAGON:
Once there was a old man who loved dragons. A magical law says that some people are allowed to come back as what killed them. So, one day he went to "Cretaceous Crackerjack Island" where he bought a T. Rex costume. He set off to find... [end]

GRIEF FOR A TIGER:
High Asia. The word brings strange, jumbled images, ones of jungles, cities, wars, idols, bazaars, [???], animals...and many more impossible to describe. Deep, deep, deep in High Asia, and in your imagination, is a great city called Zandu, and THAT is where our story begins. Zandu's main building is a giant palace, the biggest, most wonderful place in the world. The owner is called a Khan, or war-king. He (it is always a he) owns ten thousand camels, horses, elephants, rhinos, cows, servants, and warriors. He also has a friend. It, though, was not human. It was a tiger, a beautiful deep orange male, a giant Bengal tiger, with eyes as green as emeralds. The tiger was wiser than a scholar, more abler in the woods than a pathfinder, and crazier in battle than the Khan himself. The tiger's name was Raj. One day, as the two of them were taking a walk, alarm bells sounded. 
"Enemies a mile off, just a mile!" cried the runner, between pants. 
Soon, Khan was on his warhorse, his tiger beside him. The two of them fought hard, harder, and hardest as they attacked the Savages From The West, or SFTW's, as the recruits called them. In the heat of battle, nobody saw the slender person dressed in black slip off towards the palace.

Please understand, California should not exist. For millennia, for geological eons, it was below the sea–we find whales here, sometimes, but nothing was here, not really, until about 1 million years ago.

The land does not forget what it was, once.

Though the Chumash, six bands or more, traded and worked their way up and down the coast, trading as far as what is now New Mexico, or St. Louis.

Though the Spanish came, burned them and broke them and rearranged the brine that lay over so much of our city like a blanket, leaving only good soil in its wake.

There were strawberries here, once.

Consider how short we have been attached to the United States, by comparison to most others. No, we are not the Banana Republic or Seward’s Folly, but we are the ones who seem to be regretted most, for all our defensive pride.

The fact that our Gold Rush bankrolled the Civil War for the North,for all the grandstanding about who fought which and where back East, is conveniently forgotten.

We respect the land, pamper it, beg its favor, by the standards of other states, and so we are called soft hearted, foolish.

We know what will happen if we do not comply.

In the states that mock us, the land actively is trying to hurt you, hunt you, get you off it, and so those attracted to stay longer have that same ethos, that you and the land are under siege with one another, that the land, given a chance, could reclaim you.

We have the dubious kindness of warnings.

It is as though the earth itself has brought its hand down, hard, on the kitchen table, before saying how worried you make it sometimes, would it kill you to smile?

Drill all you like, they say, the land is yours for the using.

The disaster that started Earth Day, the Santa Barbara Oil Spill in 1969, was the third largest spill in history. Until 2010, four decades later, it was the second largest.

Everybody remembers this. Everyone.

In 2015 there was a far smaller oil spill from a corroded pipe, and the shifting of blame lasted until September 2018. Every time it came up, the mistrust towards oil companies was palpable, the memory of ruined beaches and wildlife and tourism revenue burned like a brand scar, memories of the choking horrible smell of brine and hot tar, birds and sea mammals and fish dead and dying, all of it together on the edge of the sea, that lasted for months on end, we remembered.

We are careful with our drilling, now.

“There were homes here, once.”

We know the fires like saints, and in a way, they are.

Coyote, Paint, Zaca, Gap, Tea, Jesusita, Thomas, Carr, and now Camp, every fire has a story, and you have your own memories.

Coyote was small, Papa says. Paint jumped the 101, Mom tells me.

The Zaca burned through Christmas, and as we sang “Silent Night” at our church, ash rained down and we joked it was snow.

The Tea Fire was in 2008, and everything, and I do mean everything, went wrong.

The Thomas raged for a month, and, without rain, I doubt I will ever see the miles from Ojai to Buellton as thick and blue-green as they once were. I doubt anybody named “Thomas” will run for office for a long while either, except Tommy Wiseau, maybe.

California is largely atheistic, or at least highly secular, but I assure you, we do have gods.

We have our Creatrix lying along the coastline to form the mountains, our homes buried against her belly, one outstretched arm splayed into the islands of our coast, another finishing the line of the sea. She accepts, she adores, she is every reason we stay, the glow of sunlight across all, the gently curving hills, the many-colored sky and sea.

Lesser goddess-saints populate our mythos–Pearl Chase, the Old Woman of San Nicholas, Madame Ganna Walska, the Rainbow Dolphin Woman. The legendary trickster figure of Alex Madonna, though his holding was in the north, is a warning in business across all reaches.

Violence is a dirty thing, and we are clean people, in Santa Barbara Beautiful.

We do not sow, is the cry of the fictional Greyjoys, and with a light, teasing grin, we know it is true of ourselves. Our money comes from other money, and medicine, and women with eyes like flint and smiles like a threat.

There was no metal here, no fish for packing, no natural harbor. A fellow named Peter Ramondino wrote an 1896 book with a chapter entitled “California for Invalids”, Santa Barbara was at the top of the list, and the wealthy invalids came, and their wealthy families came to visit, and the wealthy doctors came that they bought and paid for. Then, of course, followed the army of servants, and accountants, and lawyers, and so we continue.

And we were still piecemeal, still imperfect, until the 1925 quake and the 1929 crash, when we rose back in a shimmering mirage-world of Moorish Revival.

I assure you, we still have monsters.

The Scorekeeper is a more immediate figure. They live back east, beyond the mountains, in the entry place to the land of the dead. Men, women, children, others–the Scorekeeper knows them all. The Scorekeeper sends out “them” to aid themselves, to collect information and bring it back. Who are “they”? We do not say, and we do not tell, because to tell would be to cheat. We must not cheat, for the Scorekeeper knows every instance of cheating, every missed bill, every test, every grade, every doctor’s appointment, every record.

The Scorekeeper determines, quite simply, are you successful? Have you exercised your full potential? Did you have a strong heart, did you have grit?

If you do not, the Scorekeeper ensures that nobody will remember you.

Nobody will ever love you.